With the advent of fairly recent changes in media outlets enabled by the Internet, mobile video phones, video personal digital assistants (PDAs), smartphones and digital video discs (DVDs), in particular, represent avenues for a paradigm, shift underway in advertising and provide an “on-line” focus. Advertising on the Internet is increasing annually while siphoning advertising sales from traditional media such as print newspapers. Currently, one metric for determining the effectiveness of Internet advertising involves counting the number of daily visitors received at a site. However, this method gives an indirect measure of how many times a particular advertisement is viewed. This perhaps accounts for why Internet ads account for less than a tenth of the revenues and profits associated with advertising using both print and on-line ads.
Along with a shift in advertising methods, media in general has undergone a transformation. For instance, a greater percentage of revenue in recent years for motion pictures can be accounted for in DVD and movie-on-demand sales such as pay-per-view as compared with revenues generated at the box office. Often, ads of some type are included with DVDs and movie-on-demand broadcasts. These ads may be little more than a focused display of a vehicle used or a watch or article of clothing worn by an actor us the movie proceeds. However, the value of that advertising on those forums is indeterminate since generally, only a limited number of ads for products can be practically featured. Further, there is no direct way of accounting for sales attributable to this form of advertising.
A need exists to improve the effectiveness of Internet (e.g., Web) advertising while taking advantage of the proliferation of fairly new technologies and devices that have Internet access. A need also exists, to improve the ability to measure the effectiveness of Internet advertising.
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